Volume 34
Fall-Winter
2008 |
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My search for the psalmodikon and
the origin of the fretted dulcimer
began in New York’s Saratoga County in
the late 1960s. I used to hitch hike to Caffè
Lena in Saratoga Springs, where I first saw
and heard the fretted dulcimer. A defining
moment in my search came many years
later, during a 2003 trip to Sweden to visit
relatives in Stockholm and Mora. My wife
and I took the opportunity to visit the
cultural museum Skansen on Djurgarden, a
large island just off Gamla Stan, Stockholm.
Skansen, established in 1891 as the world’s
first open-air museum, shows more than 150
houses and farm buildings from fourteenth-to
nineteenth-century Sweden, portraying
the life of both peasants and landed gentry.
We were in the Älvros farmhouse, a typical
nineteenth-century northern farmstead and
one of the museum’s sites for regularly scheduled
folk music performances, when my wife
tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Look
at that!” Hanging on an inside log wall in the
main living area was a psalmodikon, the first
I had ever seen in person. Inside the instrument,
written in thin ink and a very delicate
script, was an illegible Swedish name, but the
written date—1842—was very clear.
Hourglass-shaped moraharpa, 1526. Zorn Collections, Mora, Sweden. Photo: K. G.
Svensson.
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The fretted dulcimer, also known as the
lap, mountain, or Appalachian dulcimer,
emerged in the southern Appalachian
Mountains. The fretted dulcimer is often
confused with the hammered dulcimer, a
multistringed harp played with small wooden
hammers. The word “dulcimer” may have
entered sixteenth-century English through
Latin translations of the Bible (Daniel 3:5),
and was broadly applied by Appalachian settlers. With a diatonic fret pattern, the
fretted dulcimer is easy to play and can be
considered a true “folk” instrument.
The instrument’s distinctive design and
musical qualities link it to several sixteenth- to
twentieth-century Swedish folk instruments.
My research has revealed obvious Swedish
musical ancestors to the fretted dulcimer as
it exists in the United States today. Detailed
links substantiate the theory that immigrants
from the region of Lake Siljan in central Sweden
and south to Stockholm brought their
folk music and instruments (the psalmodikon,
hummel, and perhaps the diatonic key pattern
of the moraharpa) to America beginning in
the seventeenth century. More than any other
immigrant group, these musicians sparked the
development of the fretted dulcimer.
Nineteenth-century psalmodikon player, Dalecarlia, Dalarna, Sweden. Courtsey Musikmuseet, Stockholm.
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Two ballads—“Systrarna” (Sisters), a medieval
Swedish ballad, and a 1656 English
ballad called “The Twa Sisters” (Child ballad
#10)—share similar references to supernatural
restoration of a broken soul through
music. In the ballads, a maiden is drowned by
her jealous sister, and through a viol or harp (a
fiddle is the usual instrument in Scandinavian
ballads) furnished by some part of her body,
she reveals the identity of her killer. Among
the English texts is the “hair” incident:
He’s taen three locks o her yellow hair,
An wi them strung his harp sae fair.
And in Swedish:
Spelmän tog hennes gullgula har,
Och gjorde där harposträngar av.
(The fiddler took her golden hair,
And made harp strings from it.)
In one Swedish version and in nearly all
the Norwegian texts, the maiden is restored
to life. The harp is dashed against a stone or
upon the floor, and the maiden stands forth
disenchanted. “The Twa Sisters” has a similar
reference:
And when she died, the fiddles played,
Her father heard how she had been
slayed.
A version of this text was collected by
John Jacob Niles in eastern Kentucky in 1932.
The textual similarities between the Swedish,
English, and later American forms of these
ballads illustrate how literary themes survive
centuries of cross-cultural generation—and
how traditional craft and music persist together
across time and place.
Detail of a nineteenth-century psalmodikon, Angermanland, Sweden. Photo courtesy of the author.
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In 1633 the New South Company was
formed by Dutch and Swedish investors to
establish a settlement in America. They first
settled near present-day Wilmington, Delaware, in 1637 and named the area New Sweden.
The second great wave of immigration
from Sweden to the United States followed
poor harvests and over-population in the
early 1840s, when thousands of Swedes were
encouraged by their government to settle in
America. The Swedes traveled north, south,
and west through Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia. Chicago became the American
Swedish population center, with more than
forty thousand Swedes in 1880, followed
by Minnesota, Maine, Kansas, and western
New York.
Appalachian three-string dulcimer made by James E. Thomas, 1913. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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The violin—in Swedish, fidele—was banned by the Lutheran church in Sweden in the early
nineteenth century as leading to dancing. Following
a fiddler, spelmän, young girls might be
enticed to dance or to go into the woods or
near the waters. In a rural culture with dances
and music for almost every occasion and
holiday, and where deep spruce woods and
cool fresh waters are everywhere, that ban was
somewhat paradoxical. The church encouraged
choral singing, but for rural congregations
that could not afford a piano or an organ,
musical accompaniment was a problem.
In 1828 Swedish Lutheran Reverend Johan
Dillner learned of the Estonian psalmodikon,
a long variously shaped instrument
with a small number of strings over a raised
fretboard, held on the lap or a table top
and played with a short horsehair bow. He
wrote a special psalmbok for his improved
psalmodikon, using the sifferskrift or tablature
method (playing by fret number). With the
psalmodikon, he taught rural Swedish choirs
hymn singing and four-part harmony. Dillner
was ordained in 1839 in the Östervalla
parish of Uppsala, just north of Stockholm,
where he encouraged his parishioners to
hantverk—build their own—and play their
psalmodikons. Before long, there were more
than ten thousand psalmodikons in his area.
Spruce trees grow straight and tall in central
Sweden, and it is the dominant wood,
followed by birch. During the holiday of
Midsommar, the third weekend of June and
the summer solstice, people decorate homes,
boats, streets, and poles with green birch
boughs, but spruce is the wood of choice
for more practical construction, including
stringed musical instruments. The psalmodikon
was often made entirely of spruce,
sometimes joined with handwrought metal
or wooden nails or hide glue and dovetail
joints. The absence of fretwire, readily available
today, forced ingenious solutions with
carved fret markers, alternately colored tone
marking, and floating bridges. Strings were
made of gut or tightly wound fibers.
L. P. Esbjorn learned in 1846 to play the
psalmodikon from the wife of Pastor Olaf
Forsell of the Östervalla parish. Esbjorn immigrated
three years later to the United States,
where he founded the Augustana Lutheran
Synod in North America. Other players
and pastors carried their psalmodikons to
America through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Psalmodikons can still be
found in Swedish museums and private collections
in New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Minnesota, Maine, Tennessee,
the Virginias, and other states. Three late
nineteenth-century Swedish psalmodikons
found in the area of Jamestown, New York,
are today in the private collection of Dennis
Dorogi of Brocton, New York. Jamestown’s
significant Swedish population started growing in 1846 with Swedish immigrants who
settled in the area after diminished resources
and sickness forced them to curtail their
westward movement along the Erie Canal to
the Great Lakes.
The author playing a Spelmäner dulcimer, Holley, New York, 2007. Photo: Ian Caspersson
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One remarkable three-stringed spruce
moraharpa, collected in 1900 by Anders Zorn
in Mora, Dalarna, Sweden, has the date 1526
carved in the back. Tuned correctly—probably
D-A-D, or in fifth intervals, and with
a diatonic (in Swedish, diatonisk) key pattern—
like the fretted dulcimer it would
have no “wrong” notes. Diatonic has many
definitions: no sharps or flats, the white piano
keys, a natural major, eight true intervals in
an octave, do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do!
The oldest known musical instrument with a diatonic
scale is a Neanderthal flute found in 1997 by
Ivan Turk, a paleontologist at the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences in Ljubljana. The flute,
a cave bear femur bone segment with four
holes, is estimated to be 43,000 to 82,000
years old. Musical instruments with diatonic
scales, including the psalmodikon, hummel,
penny whistle, harmonica, fretted dulcimer,
and chanters with bag pipes of all sorts, can
be played with minimal practice by almost
anyone. They are all “folk” instruments—of
and for the folk.
James E. Thomas (c. 1850–1933) was
the earliest documented and most prolific
dulcimer maker. This farmer from Bath in
southeastern Kentucky is credited with the
dulcimer’s distinctive hourglass form with
heart-shaped sound holes. While there is
no known record of how or from whom
Thomas learned to make dulcimers or how
he developed his distinctive design, there is
evidence of Swedish Lutheran immigrants
in the Cumberland Gap, the area where
western Virginia, southeastern Kentucky, and
northern Tennessee meet. Adam S. Johnston,
a soldier in the 79th Pennsylvania Veteran
Volunteer Infantry Regiment, kept a diary
(now held in the Library of Congress) from
September 14, 1861, to October 2, 1864. On
June 4, 1862, Johnston wrote, “Left Cowen’s
Station and marched over the Cumberland
mountains to Cumberland Gap or Sweden
Valley,” continuing, “June 5. Left Sweden
Cove Valley camp and marched through
Jaspertown.”
Thomas could certainly have seen and
heard a Swedish psalmodikon in the Cumberland
Gap region. Sandy Conatser and David
Schnaufer of Nashville, Tennessee, have documented
numerous “Tennessee music boxes”
found throughout southern middle Tennessee
and dated by family histories between 1870
and 1940. The music boxes are very similar
to primitive psalmodikons with diatonic fret
patterns. The earliest documented fretted
dulcimer-like instrument dates from 1830. The German scheitholt, a linear cousin to the
psalmodikon, has been found in Pennsylvania
as early as 1781, but the scheitholt does not
have a raised fretboard, making it virtually
impossible to play with a bow, and it has a flat
scroll. The fretted dulcimer was occasionally
played with a short horsehair bow.
Nineteenth-century psalmodikon fretboard, Dalarna, Sweden. Photo courtesy of the author.
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Today the fretted dulcimer is often used to
play a wide variety of Irish, Swedish, American,
and English fiddle and dance tunes; traditional
and modern ballads; religious hymns;
classical and baroque melodies; improvisation
and jazz; and more. Dulcimer festivals and related
events can be found in most East Coast
states and during Swedish holidays and festivals
starting with Midsommar.
Contemporary
dulcimer musicians include Jean Ritchie, Joni
Mitchell, Cindi Lauper, David Massengill,
Dan Fogelberg, Brian Jones, Jimmy Page,
Richard Thompson, Steve Martin, and the
Swedish folk band Hedningarna. Classes and
instruction are available from Dulcimer Player
News, Stewart-MacDonald, Cowan Creek
Mountain Music School, the Swannanoa
Gathering, and the John C. Campbell Folk
School.
Current innovations in fretted dulcimer
construction often incorporate acoustic
guitar building methods and details, using
three to more than eight strings and various
acoustic materials, including exotic and
domestic hardwoods, cardboard, plywood,
veneers, tin cans, chromatic frets, half frets,
removable frets, diatonic capos, banjo and
guitar tuners, violin fine tuners, and electronic
pickups. Some noted builders include Dennis
Dorogi, Jeremy Seeger, and Dwain Wilder.
Courses in dulcimer building are taught in
Marholmen, Sweden.
American regional interest in the fretted
dulcimer frequently coincides with evidence of Swedish and Scandinavian settlement. The
Swedes are well known for their handicraft
and stylized woodworking using indigenous
materials. The fretted dulcimer has
evolved continuously through more than
four hundred years, across two continents
and numerous cultures and populations.
Carved rosewood scroll on a dulcimer made by Dennis Dorogi, Brocton, New York, 2007. Photo: Dennis Dorogi
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Contemporary fretted dulcimers continue
to be constructed by itinerant luthiers and
woodworkers. The instrument’s ease of play
and variety of design have made it a popular
and affordable folk music instrument readily
available to people of all ages who have been
charmed by the strains of traditional ballads
and melodies.
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Nils R. Caspersson is a luthier and fretted
dulcimer musician living in Holley, New
York.
The fretted dulcimer, also known as the
lap, mountain, or Appalachian dulcimer,
emerged in the southern Appalachian
Mountains. The fretted dulcimer is often
confused with the hammered dulcimer, a
multistringed harp played with small wooden
hammers....My research has revealed obvious Swedish
musical ancestors to the fretted dulcimer as
it exists in the United States today.
This article appeared in Voices Vol. 34, Fall-Winter 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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